ABSTRACT
The study of the impacts of transport infrastructure and services on regional development has a long history, within which both ex-ante impacts and ex-post impacts have been of interest. The econometric approaches more often adopted in the literature usually rely on a reduced form model, where all potentially endogenous variables that may affect the possible determinants of regional development have been replaced by other structural equations. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time when a great deal of attention was devoted to the development effects of infrastructure provision. The degree of explanation of the impacts is greater in regional areas. However, in the authors’ view, ‘what is more important is that the positive impact of regional aviation growth on economic growth remains significant even with the four-year lag, which demonstrates how vital aviation is particularly to remote regions’. Data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis may be useful in this respect.
